I’ve been practicing to be a crotchety old man. And why not? I’ve earned the right to finally have some fun.

There’s an added incentive. Bad moods help me to think clearer about how to be cranky.

After years of studying the dumps down under, an Australian psychologist has concluded that grumpiness makes for better thinking. According to Professor Joe Forgas, the way the brain processes information means that bad moods make you pay more attention to your environment and so trigger careful thinking.

Being cheerful might make you more creative, but being gloomy makes you less gullible.

Here’s the really useful bit. A grumpy person, me for example, copes better with demanding situations than a happy person does. So I figure, to spread the benefits of being crotchety, I must create demanding situations for those happy clappy chappies who put me in a bad mood in the first place.

Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.